


the city where all but the living walk

by orphan_account



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Dark, Gen, High Chaos (Dishonored), Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:40:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25154845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: There is a walking dead girl among the rocks at the foot of the lighthouse.
Relationships: Samuel Beechworth & Emily Kaldwin
Comments: 8
Kudos: 25





	the city where all but the living walk

There is a walking dead girl among the rocks at the foot of the lighthouse.

Her clothes are unruffled. She looks like a mannequin, stiff and pristine despite the carnage around her. She crouches by a body, and this one is dead too, but does not walk. She unhooks the man’s skull mask and traces its structure, around the edges and hesitating over the very surface of the blood that pools within its fractured crevices, and when she drops the mask her fingers are unstained. Clean and pale. Too pale. The veins in her hands and arms show clearly, bright blue like the banners that once flew atop Dunwall Tower. Like the seal of the House of Kaldwin.

No, no. That House is dead. Broken and burned. Buried, heart torn out. This girl is no Kaldwin.

Her blood is blue like the Void, and her eyes are black like its god.

Samuel thinks he must have been seeing things, when Emily turns to look at him, and the inky darkness in her eyes fades away in time with the smile that spreads across her face. It’s crooked and tight-lipped but it’s there. And her eyes are undoubtedly brown. “You came back for me,” she says. She leaves the mask and its owner lying half-buried under sand and rocks and other men’s hopes, and her eyes never leave Samuel’s when she passes Havelock too, stepping on his bloodied hand.

There’s a crack when she does it, but Samuel doesn’t suppose it matters much. The Lord Regent’s eyes stare upward, unseeing. The way his neck is twisted, he probably died on impact; the mercy is better than the man deserved.

“Didn’t think there’d be nobody to come back for,” Samuel says, a little hoarsely. “I just—came back to see for certain. I’m sorry, Your Majesty. I shouldn’t have left you waiting.”

“It’s alright.” Emily clambers into his boat. “You won’t leave me again, will you? Not like Corvo did?”

Samuel’s cough hasn’t gone away these past three days since he left Corvo at the dock. It’s the plague, alright. He supposes he has a few more days left, at most, and that’s if he doesn’t starve first. Dunwall’s been looted to the depths of the nobles’ greedy coffers. There’s not a bite left in the city.

“No, Majesty,” he says. “I won’t leave you.”

Samuel’s breath huffs out in painful gasps, and the air he sucks in feels like oil in his lungs. His limbs feel numb. The _Amaranth_ is dead in the water, and they’re far enough from shore that they’d be supper for the hagfish before they ever made it near. Samuel supposes this is as good a place as any to die, but there’s Emily—Emily, who hasn’t got the plague yet, maybe. She’s got a chance still. As good a chance as anyone else does, which, in truth, is none at all.

But she doesn’t look afraid, right now. She looks serene, like her mother did in that Sokolov portrait. She’s waiting—for Samuel, or for the end.

“Aren’t you going to fix the engine?” she asks.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” she tells him.

He opens his mouth to argue, and shuts it again. She’s waiting for Samuel or death, and it’s not right of him to make that choice for her.

He tries tinkering with the engine again, and this time it starts up. Coughing black smoke, and liable to explode at any moment, but it starts. He ushers Emily to the very head of the boat and hopes he might shield her from the blast if it comes.

It doesn’t. They reach the Hound Pits Pub at dawn, in silence and what passes for safety these days.

The thing is—he doesn’t know how he fixed the engine. He doesn’t remember. His hands moved, but he doesn’t think he moved them.

“Samuel, I’m hungry.”

Samuel sighs. It rattles in his chest, makes him shiver. His forehead is afire. “I’m sorry, Majesty. There’s nothing here. Maybe when Miss Curnow returns, she’ll have brought some food.” He’d look for her himself, but there’s no starting up the Amaranth again, this time. Whatever moved his hands, when he fixed it before, is offering no answers this time. And trying to get through the blockades on this district would be pointless. Even Corvo couldn’t do it; what chance would an old boatman have?

“Callista,” Emily says. “She’ll bring food?”

“Yeah. Best hope so.”

Emily slides into the booth opposite of him. She tilts her head, studying him. Thoughtful, maybe. She looks like Corvo did when he was sizing up a target.

“You told me Callista was dead,” she reminds him, half-giggling with sudden laughter, her tone lilting and sing-song. “Remember? Callista’s in the courtyard, with Wallace and Lydia. You wouldn’t let me unwrap her. Not even to look and see if there was food in her pockets.”

“I told you that?” Samuel asks, or he tries to ask, because the words come out rough until they become a full-blown coughing fit. Every movement is a knife scraping the lining of his throat. Dizziness overtakes him. Pain wracks his entire body, and he wonders how much longer ‘til the weeping starts. ‘Til the screaming, the crying, the shouting, the clawing. He doesn’t want to scare Emily. He can’t just leave her, either. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do.

At some point during his fit he presses his face into the table, into blessedly cool wood, and he lets himself drift away for a while. Out on the Wrenhaven. He always wanted to die on the water; he can almost taste its sweetness, imagining it now.

Time passes. Hours, minutes; do they exist at all? Samuel wonders if there’s still a calendar with no Abbey to maintain it.

“Samuel,” comes a voice to interrupt him from his thoughts.

He raises his head wearily, reluctantly. The shock of pain in his neck and spine and whole body takes him by surprise. He bites back a scream, forces himself to breathe until it passes—and it does, mostly. It takes a moment for his eyes to focus, searching the room for a familiar white-suited blur.

“Samuel,” Emily repeats, and he finds her at the other end of the pub.

She’s on her knees by the stove that’s long since gone cold, and she smiles at him, stringy flesh between her teeth, cupping a large rat between her palms. Its stomach torn open. Blood flows, but it passes through her fingers, drips through her teeth and her chin down to the floor, as though she isn’t even there at all.

“Come on,” Emily says, joy crinkling the skin around her eyes. Lightless eyes, no trace of brown in them. The shadows suck Samuel in until there is no color at all in the world around him. “You should eat, Samuel. You don’t have to be hungry anymore.”

Shock and nausea are crawling their way up from Samuel’s stomach to his throat, but when he opens his mouth it isn’t words that flood out.

The sun comes up on another morning and there is a dead girl standing on the roof of the Hound Pits Pub, watching the river. There is an old boatman stood beside her.

He's a little rough around the edges, little bloody, little empty underneath his ribs, but he's standing.

The living don't live in Dunwall anymore, they're saying on the other Isles. And oh, no one lives there, but it's not still. Oh, it's not silence you'll find if you go looking. If you go hunting for adventures, darling, don't go hunting there.

'Cause the living don't live in Dunwall, they're saying. That city's for the dead.

**Author's Note:**

> hey y'all! hope you liked this.


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